The 550 black is a surprisingly good value chip (as is the 720). Both will give you more then reasonable performance. When I had to RMF my 6600 under warranty I ended up building out a 720 black box as a work station. I happened to be in Fries and they had a NV 250 on an endcap priced at $59.99?? Called over a sales guy and said somebody goofed and you need to pull those before somebody gets tweaked....long story short the store manger let me buy one for $60. System has 4G of DDR3 (1600) on XP (SP3) and maxes out AH even with roughly 80 processes running including all kinds of stuff skuzzy hates. I don't turn anything off at all including AV. Now my system is correctly tuned and configured so my "background" CPU use is always under 2% and the 3rd core handles things that would probably impact AH in my 6600. I liked it (720) so much I built out a 550 black box for my wife...it has 3 cores unlocked (4th is unlockable but not stable under stress)...
That was a sweet deal on the 250 ... I need to find a deal like that !
I'm guessing the 8800GTS i have is holding me back now ... next piece of the PC puzzle i guess .
My 550 does the exact same thing with the 4th core , i have to throw way too much Vcore at it to be worth the trouble . I'm surprised how easy these are to overclock .... It was cake with the upper multipliers open 8) .I was plesantly surprised to find my H20 cooling system was compataible with socket AM3 , the water block fit but i had to "modify" the clip that holds it. It sits at 36C under load @ 3850mhz 1.375V...with 3 hours of prime and idle's around 25C. I'm betting 4GHZ is doable but I'm going to let it burn in for a couple weeks and see how it goes. <S>
